While I Was Gone (7 page)

“Duncan’s room is next to you. You’re lucky. You’d be lucky, I mean. He’s quiet. I have John and Sara. They’re not here right now.

love them both, but they make an astonishing amount of noise.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“Well, they have to laugh a lot, cause they’re big dopers. Most ny drug will do. It’s a kind of principle with them, ‘the expansion of l,her brains.” Her fingers made nervous quotation marks.

“You sould offer them anything, acne medication or anything, and they’d false X,” She tilted her head back, pretending to swallow.

“Glug, glug, * ,” Mnen she looked at me, her eyes wide.

“But also,” she said, they screw a great, great deal.”

She had a funny voice, I thought. Harsh and staccato, and somehow touching.

“I am quiet as a mouse,” she announced.

“And you?”

“I never really thought about it. I’ve never lived with anyone.” The words were out before I even realized that I was Lying again. But this time it felt like the truth, I think because I hadn’t considered my marriage truly living with someone. Ted and I had moved in such different worlds from the start that I’d learned nothing about myself even as roommate, much less as a wife, from being with him.

“Actually, though,” I said now, “I think I am. Quiet. But if I owned a record player, I wouldn’t be.” I was remembering the long days I spent alone in the attic apartment in Philadelphia. Often I’d played music and danced by myself, danced until my hair was lank with sweat.

“Yeah, well, that’s another rule. We can’t play music in our rooms after eleven. In point of fact, Duncan is the only one who even has one—a record player. Eli did, but he gave it to the house, so it’s downstairs. We all use it.”

“Nice of him,” I said.

“Eli can’t help being nice,” Dana said.

I was sent outside to the porch while they decided.

I sat on the front steps and watched a group of children in the playground next door. They were tough-looking, older. Too old, it seemed to me, for the forlorn swing set and teeter-totter. In fact, they seemed to be doing something secret and possibly delinquent in the huddle they made in the corner of the play area—starting a fire, maybe. Or passing a joint. One of them glanced furtively over at me, and I turned quickly away. I busied myself looking at the house. My house.

It was sided in pale-green asphalt, with water or mildew marks of blackish gray drooping like dirty aprons under many of the windows.

A wide, worn porch bent around its front half. There were gaps in the rails and splintering floorboards. The railing along the front steps had been replaced with wrought iron.

Though I tried not to, I couldn’t help wondering what the people inside the house might be saying about me. I hadn’t talked enough, felt. They’d think I was depressed. Which was only fair, of course.

was depressed, wasn’t I? Certainly quiet as a mouse, at the very least.

But apparently this was just what you wanted in a neighbor. My good luck, perhaps. I tried to visualize them then, talking, but found that the only face I could conjure up was Dana’s. I searched in my bag, found my cigarettes, and nervously smoked one.

I had just pUt it Out and was about to light another, when Dana came out on the porch. I turned to her.

“You’re ayes!” she cried.

“Oh, I’m so pleased, Licia.”

I stood up, grinning back at her.

“Me too,” I said, and then realized how true that was. How relieved I was. My limbs felt longer suddenly, looser.

Dana was doing a little barefoot dance, twirling. Her hair swung skirt like around her shoulders.

“Oh, I had my merry way with them!”

she crowed as she spun.

“Ah,” I said.

“Was there resistance?”

Dana stopped.

“Oh, no! You mustn’t think that! None!” she cried.

“None! I just meant that I was the only one who really cared that much.”

It struck me suddenly that I’d recognized this, that I’d known all along that she wanted me in the house.

“Why did you care?”

Dana shrugged.

“I was desperate for another woman, for one. I mean, besides Sara. Who’s really more like one of John’s vestigial organs. I feel so outnumbered all the time.” And then a wide grin opened her face—you could see nearly every strong white tooth in her mouth.

“And the moment I saw you, I thought, She could be my friend.”

Her hands lifted elaborately, palms up, in a dancer’s gesture. It was as if she were holding something ceremonially to give to me.

I looked away quickly, I was so embarrassed.

When I moved in the next day, there was a coffee can set on the battered old desk, filled with spry white daisies.

ALL THIS HAPPENED EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF 1968, WHEN

dozens of houses like ours had sprung up all over Cambridge, all over Berkeley and Chicago and Philadelphia and San Francisco. Some were more political than ours or had a theme of sorts—everyone was into organic food or political action or alternative theater or an arts magazine. Some were, like ours, mixed, a little bit of everything.

You found rooms in these houses through bulletin boards, as I had, or through friends, or political organizations, or underground streams of information. They coexisted, often uneasily, with houses belonging to mostly working-class neighbors. People who took care of their yards, who repaired their railings, who had combination screens and storm windows, who kept their doors locked at night.

Not us. The door stood open round the clock. Music blared into the street from the windows—Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Pablo Casals, the Stones, Julian Bream, the Beatles, Brahms, Janis Joplin.

Bikes were parked all over the porch and the scrubby front yard.

Unlocked, it goes without saying.

I lived that summer like a happy dream. I worked late at the blues club every night and often stayed up several hours later than that, talking to one or another of my housemates. Slowly, I felt, I came to know them all better than I’d ever known Ted, or anyone, in my other life.

The house generally rose late through those summer months—no one but Sara had normal working hours—and often two or three of us did something together in the daytime. Drove to Singing Beach, took a picnic and a Frisbee down to the river. On a rainy day, we went to the movies. Or played long, cutthroat games of Scrabble in the living room, with the windows open to the porch and the steady racket of the rain on the porch roof or dripping down on the leaves of the leggy lilac bushes.

Nearly every weekend through the summer we had a party.

remember a moment at one of them when the living room was so crowded with people—people someone knew or had brought along, people who’d just heard the noise and wandered in—that the whole room seemed to move up and down as one, a slow stoned humping to “Go Ask Alice.” I felt I had lost myself in it, lost that embarrassed sense of how I looked, how I seemed to others, that earlier I would have said was a permanent part of who I was.

There were six other members of the house. Duncan was a g utarist. He was tall, elegant. Often he seemed bored by all of us.

He had a girlfriend on the West Coast, an actress. Two of her publicity shots were tacked on the wall beside his bed. In them, her mouth with its shiny dark lips was open and her eyelids were lowered thickly, as though she were about to sneeze. I had trouble believing this was person anyone would know, but Duncan spoke of her easily, casually, as though she were living among us too. Sheree.

He was studying composition at Berklee. He made his living giving music lessons and playing nightly in a Spanish restaurant—flamenco and, occasionally, when he could get away with it, classical pieces. He had a small, thin mustache. He reminded me of a generic movie star of the forties, handsome and rakish. I actually spent a lot of time with him, because he and I generally arrived home at almost the same late hour, usually wound up from work and not ready for bed. But he was so hard to talk to that I was always glad when someone else was awake, too, and the conversation could be more relaxed. I remember one night I saw him approaching me from the opposite end of the block as I was coming home, a tall, dark shape carrying a guitar case. I knew, even from a great distance, who it was, and the pressing question for me became, At what point do I call out a greeting? In the end, I didn’t, for fear he’d be somehow offended, or contemptuous. We actually turned into the driveway simultaneously and had begun to walk up it toward the lighted house before I said, “Good night?” He shrugged in response. I didn’t much like Duncan, he made so little effort socially.

When I heard him play, though, my thinking about him shifted entirely.

“That’s really what it was with me too,” Dana confessed to me. We were sitting in the kitchen very late one night, talking.

She had waited up for me after work. Duncan had come home late, and sat with us for a beer, then gone upstairs to call Sheree, collect.

“I’m crazy about his music. Those fingers!” He did have beautiful hands, I had noticed them. The fingernails were carefully shaped and shone with clear polish, to strengthen them for the g utar. She frowned.

“I

don’t know why I always have to do this—fall in love with people who do something beautifully. And it hardly matters what, really. It’s the competence. It’s the devotion to something. It just makes me hot.”

Then why are you drawn to me? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to presume to name Dana’s feelings about me.

Larry was the one I felt most comfortable with from the start.

He taught history at Harvard and was a political activist. He was out a good deal of the time, “rousing the rabble,” as he called it, mocking himself more than the rabble. His room was small, the smallest in the house. He had an enormous poster of Ho Chi Minh on the wall, and all the floor space not taken up by the bed was occupied with bench press and scattered weights. He was short and powerfully muscled. He wore his hair in a DA, with a tumble of slicked curls trained to fall forward in the middle of his forehead, like Gene Mmcent, like Jerry Lee Lewis. He liked the incongruity, he told me once, of being a commie body-building greaser hood. He had the only car in the house and didn’t mind being thought of as a chauffeur.

“We could get Larry to take us,” we’d say, and he always would if he could. We’d cram in, rearranging the stacks of flyers, shoving the posters up on the ledge under the rear window, and he would drive us—to the North End for Italian food, to the Cape, to the movies, to the Square.

Sara and John were much as described by Dana. She’d forgotten to mention, though, that Sara was a lawyer. She’d graduated high in her class from Harvard Law School and now worked in a poverty-law office for a piddling wage. She supported them both. It was understood that John was writing a novel, but I knew, since I was home through much of the day, that he was doing no such thing.

“His work habits aren’t really the kind that lend themselves to the long haul,” I told Dana.

“In that he has no work habits.”

Eli was the handsomest man in the house, and yet he left the least impression on me at the time. And I would guess that this was true for all of us. He was quiet, of course. Shy. He seemed content, most of the time, simply to observe, to watch the action, whatever the action was.

And he was gone a good deal of the time, running experiments that required his presence for long hours at a stretch or at odd times of the day or night. And probably my assumptions about him—our assumptions, for I think we all shared them, that he was unimaginative, little dull, certainly less free, less wild, less fascinating than we were-these made it even harder to see what he might truly have been like. I remember one night after dinner we were playing a game in the living room. It was Dana’s invention. We’d all written down one adjective for each person in the house, and John collected our scraps of paper.

His job was to read all the adjectives about one person aloud. The appointed guesser had to say who was being described and why she thought so. Sara was the appointed guesser, because, as Larry put it, she was the only one with “no agenda.”

“What does that mean, no agenda?” Sara had cried with alarm.

“It means saintly, Sar,” said Dana.

“It means sweet.”

“It means perpetually stoned,” said Duncan.

Sara laughed.

“Mean, Dunkey. For you, my adjective would be mean, mean, mean.”

“You only get one, baby.”

For Eli, the adjectives were gentle, quiet, mysterious, gray, aloof and pellucid.

“Objection,” Sara said. She lifted a legal finger.

“How can someone be both mysterious and pellucid?”

“And who’s doing these color things?” Duncan asked. One of Larry’s adjectives had been red.

“Shh. No questions from us. It’ll give everything away.”

“Come on. Sara’s so out of it she’d never put two and two together.”

“Besides, red, in Larry’s case, might not be a color but a political persuasion,” I offered.

“Maybe this person is apparently mysterious while being pellucid, or apparently pellucid while being mysterious.” Larry was smoking cigar, and it chimneyed violently as he relaxed his draw.

“Did Sara ask for clues?” Dana said.

“Are we supposed to be giving her these clues?”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Sara said.

“I know it’s Eli.”

‘fesus, the chemically altered brain proves superior after all!” said Larry.

“How did you know?”

“I knew. I just knew,” Sara said.

“No.” She squinted in concentration. There were blurry finger marks all over the lenses of her glasses.

“No. Because of gray and pellucid. They are… Ies motsjustes.”

She said it again, contemplatively, “Les mots justes. ” “Who said gray? Was it the same person who said red? Is someone doing colors?”

“I said gray,” Eli said.

“Not red, though.”

“Eli!” cried Dana.

“Why, why did you say gray about yourself?

That makes me so sad.” And in fact, her face was angtushed. She was sitting on the floor by the couch Eli was sunk into, and she leaned forward now to touch his knees.